BOATING ON THE THAMES

Although this blog is about boating on the Thames, I'm going to include a story I wrote about boating on the Burgundy Canal in my RichmondReview blog. You see... one of the reasons we bought the barge is because we're thinking of doing 'the French thing' in a few years time. So our holiday was a bit of a recce. I know that to compare is to despair, but I have to be honest and say that boating on the Burgundy Canal is pretty boring compared to boating on the Thames. And the 12 days we spent on the Canal between Tonnerre and Montbard in June were probably our worst holiday ever. The fact that it rained every day didn't help. And we had problems with our 'luxury' hire boat.  I say luxury in inverted commas because the boat smelt damp and musty, parts of it were downright dirty and brown duvet covers have never been synonymous with luxury to me (I was hoping for crisp, white cotton sheets and plump, lavender scented pillows). Back to the prob...

Three life changing things have happened since my last post on A Man, A Woman and a Boat: 1. I became Mrs J (we got married in September 2013) 2. I closed findaTVexpert.com (earlier this year in fact) 3. We bought a 15 mtr Piper barge which has made boating on the Thames even more wonderful Happy Chance (the barge) is our third boat, as we upgraded from our original 7.5mtr Antaris Dutch cruiser to a slightly bigger Diamond Dutch cruiser in 2012. She came down from Stoke on Trent on the back of a truck and was launched at the Thames & Kennet Marina in May 2015. I wrote a piece about our first year on Happy Chance for the Piper Boat website. I could copy and paste it into this post, but the photo layout wouldn't work as well. So here's the link instead: http://www.piperboats.com/owners-articles-22/

I started A Man, A Woman and a Boat ( BoatingStories.blogspot.co.uk ) in September 2009 when we bought our first boat and kept it up (sort of) for a few years. Then life got busy ... I put it on hold ... and completely forgot my log in details. I've tried everything but to no avail. So after a frustrating week of emails to Microsoft, debates on forums, etc, I've decided to accept the fact that I can't access it any longer. I considered adding my boating stories to my other blog - The Richmond Review - but it didn't feel right. Because that's more about life in general and what I'm doing now that I've closed my business (www.findaTVexpert.com). So I've copied and pasted all the boating posts and photos from my original blog into this one and will continue from where I left off.  Enjoy!